Pride is a highly pleasant emotion; this internal reward can incentivize people to undertake and persevere at costly but socially valued courses of action. Pride has a full-body display featuring an erect and expanded posture and gaze directed at the audience and thus it appears to generate common knowledge about the individual’s enhanced value. This display conveys achievement and dominance, is produced by congenitally blind individuals, and is recognized by young children and by adults across cultures.

Pride is a universal system that is part of our species’ cooperative biology.

See also this research group’s related article on shame.